This book addresses age-based persecution of children as a crime against humanity in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes (persecution - with some variation in the elements of the crime - is an existing offence under the Rome Statute of the permanent International Criminal Court, the statutes of various international criminal tribunals i.e. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and under the statutes of other international criminal courts (i.e. the Special Court of Sierra Leone)). The book introduces a completely original concept in international criminal law, however, in discussing age-based persecution of children as an international crime against humanity where (i) the particular discrete child collective is targeted ‘as such’ for international atrocity crimes or (ii) individual children are targeted based on their age-based group identity as it intersects with other perpetrator – targeted characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, religion etc.

Describes the various ways in which children can be abused or neglected, details the changes in the way society has viewed the question of intervention in the family to protect children, including the ways in which the system itself can abuse, and discusses related issues.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children. Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to include several stages of childhood development, prompting reformers to create legal categories such as statutory rape and carnal abuse to protect children. However, while ordinary New Yorkers' involvement in the prosecution of those offenses reshaped their understandings of who was a child and produced a new concern to establish the age of their sexual partners, their beliefs in childhood innocence and in a concept of sexuality centered on sexual intercourse remained unchanged. As a result, families' use of the law and jurors' decisions ultimately diminished the protection the new laws offered to children. Robertson's study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture.

This book is a practical and thoughtful guide for the forensic interview of children, presenting a synthesis of the empirical and theoretical knowledge necessary to understand the account of child victims of abuse or witnesses of crime. It is a complex task to interview children who are suspected of being abused in order to gather their stories, requiring the mastery of many skills and knowledge. This book is a practical one in that constant links are made between the results of the research and their relevance for the interventions made when interviewing child victims of abuse or witnesses of crime and in understanding their accounts. This book also presents in a detailed and concrete way the revised version of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD-R) Protocol, a forensic structured interview guide empirically supported by numerous studies carried out in different countries. The step-by-step explanations are illustrated with a verbatim interview with a child, as well as other tools to help the interviewer to prepare and handle an efficient and supportive interview. Conducting Interviews with Child Victims of Abuse and Witnesses of Crime is essential reading for stakeholders in the justice, social and health systems as well as anyone likely to receive allegations from children such as educators or daycare staff. Although the NICHD-R Protocol is intended for forensic interviewers, the science behind its development and application is relevant to all professionals working with children.

Legal experts, sociologists, and social workers debate the definition of child pornography, the punishment of offenders, and the protection of victims